Debbie Reynolds’ name in lights again in Las Vegas

The actress-turned-businesswoman owned the Debbie Reynolds hotel-casino in the 1990s, a spot that included a showroom and a Hollywood museum. Decades earlier, her name hung over the Strip while advertising a history-making residency at the Riviera.

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Reynolds even joked about her place in it while performing in the showroom.

“She used to tease about that in her show,” Reynolds’ son Todd Fisher said. “She said, ‘When I die, I want to be stuffed and put in a museum.’ Well, we didn’t stuff her but we did put her in a museum.”

She and her Las Vegas connections are center stage once more thanks to an extensive conservation process that put her hotel-casino’s neon sign on display at the Neon Museum.

On Wednesday night, a “Debbie” sign lit up to a vibrant pink and renewed to a glory that brought out applause and gasps of adoration from a crowd of museum supporters and Reynolds fans. Less than 12 weeks before, the sign was sitting in the Neon Museum’s boneyard, rusted in some spots and paint faded from more than three decades of sun exposure.

“I mean, I get emotional when I see it,” Fisher said, looking at the refurbished, 24-foot-long sign while her showtunes played over the event’s speakers.

The star’s massive signature was hidden in the carefully organized rubble of old signs that make up the layout of the Neon Museum. Crews pulled it out from behind the Stardust and Liberace signs in late July.

By early October it was sitting dimmed to viewers wandering around the boneyard. Then, only 16 hours after a different piece of Vintage Las Vegas was lost to history — the 67-year-old Tropicana was demolished in the early morning hours — “Debbie” was alight to entertain Las Vegas once again.

Committing to restoration 

This is the first major restoration project coming out of a recent initiative between the museum and YESCO, a leading sign company based in Salt Lake City with an extensive history in Las Vegas. The long-time museum partners created a $50,000 annual conservation fund that pays for restoration services to preserve the history and legacy of Vegas through neon signs.

“We’ve really taken it as a major effort to put that at the forefront of our mission,” said Aaron Berger, the Neon Museum’s executive director. “It’s not just to have pieces out, but what can we do to bring them back to light? It’s the number two comment we get from visitors.

“Their first comment is, the museum is too small. The second comment is, we want more signs that are lit and restored. So we’re listening to the visitors, and we’re doing that.”

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Berger declined to specify how much the renovation cost. He said the museum has a policy against disclosing the cost of any projects because some need more work done than others based on their condition. It took about nine months to secure funding to fix “Debbie.” Ultimately the sponsors were identified as YESCO, Reynolds’ son Todd Fisher, Jonathan James Haas and an anonymous donor.

YESCO designed and financed the original Debbie Reynolds hotel signs – perhaps not shockingly. The Young family’s company has been behind scores of Las Vegas signs, from iconic casinos to the more ubiquitous neon sign in a shopping center. The company provided 187 signs on loan to Neon Museum’s nonprofit in the early 2000s when it realized how many were taking up space in its boneyard.

Those signs and others eventually became the Neon Boneyard, where museum tourists wander through thoughtfully placed old signs that reflect a piece of Las Vegas’ history – some lit up and on center display for patrons and tour guides to take in their full effect. Still others are tucked behind those with brighter bulbs, not reflecting the artistry that shone through on their best nights decades prior.

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Glass-blowing Debbie’s signature

Some lucky signs, like Debbie, get a chance to be center stage again. In this sign’s case, crews lifted the estimated 4,000-pound sign out of the Neon Boneyard on a sweltering late July morning and took it to YESCO’s sprawling workshop on Cameron Street near the Orleans hotel.

At the start of the renovation process, Jeff Young, executive vice president of YESCO, said “part of the excitement” of restoring the sign was figuring out exactly what color neon the sign was.

Here’s what YESCO found: the color was VOL mercury rose, a vibrant pink that no longer exists because the company went out of business. Instead, neon artists used EGL coral pink, a near replica of the original color.

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They found another unfortunate development when working on the sign. Berger said normally restoration crews will only replace tubes as needed. Because neon and argon can last forever, it’s important to keep the original glass tubes when possible to illustrate the changes over time. But it wasn’t in this case – too much mercury was found in the old glass tubes, rendering them unusable.

So neon artists like Oscar Gonzalez got to work on creating entirely new tubes out of Reynolds’ signature throughout August and September. In a room literally buzzing with electricity and blasted A/C, he lays massive sheets of paper on the table with a portion of the sign’s design blown up to scale.

Next, he selects the glass tubes with the correct color (determined by the tube’s inner phosphor powder coating and which gas is flowing through) and blow the shapes, segment by segment, of the cursive name. Glass blowers must concentrate on getting the curves right quickly after holding the glass over one 1,600-degree flame.

It’s then that the glass is at its hottest and most flexible. But the material is fickle. Imagine a plastic straw: bend it incorrectly and a crease is created, limiting the gas flowing through. But blow the glass too big at the crease and gas will coagulate there.

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“In terms of craftsmanship and technical craftsmanship, neon is one of those traits and skills that is really hard to replicate,” Young said. “It’s very hard to get good at, and the people that are really good at it are hard to find.”

In a more neon-tinted era, YESCO employed about 40 glass blowers across its U.S. operation. As LEDs become the default for their efficiency and creative flexibility, neon signs have fallen out of fashion. The company now has six neon artists, Young said.

Decades of history

Restoring the Debbie sign has sentimental value to others at YESCO. In the paint shop in early September, supervisor Tom Day remembers working on the first version of the sign in the early 1990s. Now, he’s supervising nephew Cody Day, a paint apprentice. The pair and others didn’t strip the metal cabinet of its paint, since it was YESCO-made. Instead they sanded it down to a point that it would accept new paint, seal with epoxy and a top coat.

After, the electrical crew installed the neon and wiring. The whole process took about 250 hours.

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At the relighting ceremony Wednesday evening, Young said the Debbie restoration has given him a chance to reflect on his family’s history in Las Vegas — one that began with hand-lettered signs and is now responsible for hundreds of neon and LEDs, massive marquees and smaller wayfinding signs and everything in between.

The 104-year-old YESCO (short for Young Electric Sign Company) first started to do business in the valley around 1932, when the family estimates Young’s grandfather came through on his way from Salt Lake to Los Angeles. The company credits its Vegas success to a groundbreaking neon sign developed for the Boulder Club in 1945.

The signmakers have been in partnership with some of the most famous businesses in Las Vegas history. Notable work from their portfolio include Vegas Vic, The Mint, the neon Silver Slipper (now on display on Las Vegas Boulevard next to the Neon Museum) and Circus Circus’ marquee, among others.

“Talk about the best of all worlds,” Young said. “You have an unbelievably famous woman who opens a casino, bless her heart, with an unbelievably famous set of kids who had great fame, fortune, all that. For us to full-turn commemorate her life, her career, the history of Las Vegas, and intertwine that with our family and our family business – does it get any better than that?”

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For others, the restoration has been a chance to remember the town as it was then, and what it has become. Lisa Adams, an assistant original designer of the sign, came down to the workshop floor from her upstairs office tucked away from the warehouse one day in September. She appreciated how close it was to the original, but pointed out the dotted ‘i’ had more of a heart-shape in original designs.

“I’m just glad she’s being remembered,” said Adams, who has spent 41 years with YESCO. “It kind of got lost. When we first went looking in the archives we couldn’t find anything and it makes you kind of sad. I remember being in the original meetings. I loved it. I didn’t want it to be lost.”

Reynolds’ history in Las Vegas spans decades – long before her signature hung on a casino. The actress, famous for her role in “Singin’ in the Rain,” began her time in Vegas in 1962. Still dealing with the attention from ex-husband Eddie Fisher’s divorce and love affair with actress Elizabeth Taylor several years earlier, Reynolds took her children, Todd and future “Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher, to Las Vegas where she began the first million-dollar residency on the Strip. Her show at the Riviera hotel-casino provided stability while raising her children.

Years later, Reynolds and then-husband Richard Hamlett purchased the former Paddlewheel hotel-casino, at 305 Convention Center Drive, for $2.2 million in 1992 and renamed it the Debbie Reynolds Hotel. They spent millions more to renovate it to the Hollywood theme that featured her collection of film and television memorabilia.

Despite the Tinseltown allure, the hotel-casino struggled financially through its operations. By 1997, Reynolds filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections. The property was sold a year later.

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Bringing ‘Debbie’ to a museum

Reynolds’ Vegas life left an impression on Fisher. An adult working in the family’s business by the time the hotel was sold, Fisher remembers how much it meant to his mother.

“How many children get to see their mother’s name on the sign?” he said while visiting the YESCO workshop during the restoration process in mid-September. He continued while looking up at the sign, nearly double his height at its tallest point: “And it’s not even her name. Her name is Mary. (A Warner bros executive) said they had too many Marys so they went with Debbie.”

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In fact, the idea of restoring the Debbie sign for the museum came from her devotion to memorializing Hollywood. Reynolds was a notorious collector – she kept costumes, programs, signed headshots of just about everyone she worked with and more. Fisher said her collection of memorabilia reached 3,000 costumes and 10,000 other artifacts before a portion was auctioned off. He opted to keep his collection of “a few hundred” costumes with the goal of founding another Hollywood museum in Las Vegas.

After displaying some of her costumes tied to shows in Las Vegas during the museum’s 2023 Duck Duck Shed design event, Berger said the museum approached Fisher about reilluminating the sign in their collection. They planned to place her exhibit near signs about other famous Vegas performers like Liberace.

“I think it was providing her an opportunity to be both mother and entertainer, then ultimately owning the casino was planting a stake in Las Vegas’ skyline,” Berger said. “To say, ‘this is a woman-owned casino. I am going to finally take all this memorabilia that I have collected over decades and have it be a museum.’”

Contact McKenna Ross at mross@reviewjournal.com. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on X.